December 1, 1994
WebCrawler acquires two sponsors,
DealerNet and
Starwave.
Both companies provided money to help keep WebCrawler operating.
WebCrawler was fully supported by advertising on October 3, 1995 but
maintained a strict separation between the advertising and the search
results.

June 1, 1995
America Online acquires WebCrawler. At the time of the acquisition, AOL
had fewer than 1 million users, and no capability to access the Web. It was believed that AOL's resources could help make the most of WebCrawler's future.

September 4, 1995
Spidey is born. In the first of WebCrawler's many design changes, we moved
to a new look, with Spidey as the mascot. Spidey took on many personalities
over the years and exemplified the fun, lighthearted spirit that WebCrawler
strove for.

April, 1996
WebCrawler extends its functionality from pure search to include the
best human-edited guide for the Web: GNN Select. Formerly known as
the Whole Internet Catalog, GNN Select was the editorial product of a
small team of Internet-savvy researchers headed by Abbot Chambers.

April 1, 1997Excite acquires WebCrawler. AOL sold WebCrawler to the
Mountain View, CA company Excite. WebCrawler was initially supported by its own
dedicated team within Excite, but that was eventually abandoned in favor of
running both WebCrawler and Excite on the same back end.

2001InfoSpace acquires WebCrawler.
Excite, now Excite@Home, went belly up.
In the bankruptcy, Infospace acquired WebCrawler.
Today Infospace runs WebCrawler as a meta-search engine. And they've
given Spidey a new name and turned him purple!